VAP - Chapter 136
Chapter 136: The Intersection of Illusion and Reality (1)
When Yue Du regained consciousness, she was in a grove of giant… mushrooms.
She looked up at the sky and saw a massive red moon hanging directly overhead. The moonlight was bright, but its color made the brightness seem eerie.
Yue Du looked around again. As far as the eye could see, there were only mushrooms.
Actual mushrooms, with caps and stems, in all sorts of colors and shapes. The smallest was at least half a person tall, while the largest was the height of a two-story building.
Many of the mushroom caps shimmered with a faint fluorescent light, appearing both dreamlike and terrifying under the red moonlight, as if a monster could leap out from among them at any moment to rip and tear at human flesh.
Yue Du herself was lying beside the stem of a short, stout black mushroom. The sensation against her back was soft and slightly damp, enough to give her goosebumps.
Yue Du: “…”
She had seen all sorts of things, but even she couldn't help but wear a blank expression at the sight before her.
The main reason for her bewilderment wasn't the peculiar scenery, but the question of why she was here at all.
The last few times Yue Du had crossed a world barrier in her physical body, her starting point had always been in an inhabited area, where she would take over the identity of someone who resembled her and had just died.
But this time was different. There wasn't another soul in sight, only a deathly silence.
And she was still wearing the clothes she had arrived in—the black and white uniform from the Main God's space—rather than the attire of this small world.
In other words, was there no identity for her to assume this time?
Without getting up, Yue Du called up the data she had received on this small world, trying to find information about her current location.
This was a truly bizarre world, especially compared to the previous ones.
The modern supernatural world, the Western fantasy world, the cultivation world, and the interstellar era—these were all settings Yue Du had heard of in her original world. But this world was different.
It was designated as the Illusion-1 Small World, and the data file began with a single sentence:
“This is a failed world!”
Unlike the data's typically cold, academic tone, this sentence revealed a strong, subjective opinion, even a hint of exasperation, making one wonder who had written it.
Only then did the overall description of the world begin.
In the early stages of the Illusion-1 Small World's development, humans were the only species to evolve the ability to reshape nature. They grew stronger and stronger, eventually becoming the most powerful race on the planet.
All other living beings were trampled underfoot. Even species physically stronger than individual humans succumbed to the tools humanity created, becoming domesticated.
Up to this point, the world's developmental trajectory was identical to that of Yue Du's original world. By comparison, the Illusion-1 Small World should have been in the early stages of a steam age, on the cusp of a period of rapid technological advancement.
But just then, something went wrong with the world.
Outsiders had “invaded.”
It started with one person, a member of a wilderness expedition. He and his companions had gone to explore a forest. A month later, he was the only one to return, and he was half-mad.
The expedition member told anyone who would listen that he had once been a king living in a magnificent castle, with servants presenting him with food every day. He also claimed to be a child of the gods, and that anyone who harmed him would face divine retribution.
Everyone thought he was a lost cause. A newspaper published his story in a small column, the tone tinged with a bit of dark humor.
And so, when he urgently claimed there were monsters in the forest that made people dream and then devoured them in their sleep, no one believed him.
The orderly assigned to care for him just placated him, saying, “Alright, alright, there are monsters,” paying no mind to the madman's ravings.
Then, the monsters truly arrived.
This species was more grotesque than anything humanity had ever imagined. They were adept at weaving illusions, creating an incredibly realistic web to trap their prey like spiders before devouring them.
The tools humanity had created seemed utterly useless against this species. When you raised a gun to fire at the head you saw in your sights, you could never know if your bullet would strike the monster, a tree, or one of your own kind.
Or perhaps, it wouldn't appear in your vision at all. You would eat, work, and sleep in peace, completely unaware that you were lying in the monster's lair (if they even had lairs), waiting to be chosen and devoured.
Faced with such an overwhelming disadvantage, humanity seemed doomed to extinction.
But the monsters didn't seem to intend to exterminate them. They raised humans within illusions, much like humans raised livestock. For a dark, bleak period, humanity went from being the tamers to the tamed.
The only difference was that horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs might know they were being farmed, whereas humans would only return to reality at the very last moment of their lives—when the monster could no longer be bothered to maintain the illusion—just in time to face their death.
Despair came from the monsters, but so did hope.
Humans were a species that relied on creating tools to change nature; these monsters, however, relied on their own bodies.
Their illusions—which some called “mental rendering”—could subtly and imperceptibly alter other things in the natural world.
Judging by the end result, the species' aesthetic was surprisingly consistent: a style of the grotesque and bizarre.
But the environmental changes weren't humanity's turning point. The turning point lay in the fact that humans, too, were “other things in the natural world”—and the only ones with intelligence.
The constant mental rendering transformed the complex human body in some way incomprehensible to humanity. In any case, the results were positive. In the short span of a hundred years, humans evolved the ability to influence the external world with their minds.
If that were all, they might not have been able to resist the monsters; they would have simply continued to happily use their new abilities in their daily lives.
However, one ability among them had a very simple name.
It was called “Reality.”
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